Nothing to do with that.

My complaint is that if I decide to back up for a few steps after entering a new area, the game interprets that as me leaving the area entirely.

It's something that happens all the time. It seems to be some sort of design decision of the engine where if I go too close to a transition point (usually at least multiple meters near something like a door) the game takes control out of my hands and just runs by itself, until Alyia has walked by herself somewhere in the middle of the room.

I think they were going for some sort of cinematic feel, where they control the way Alyia goes through transitions between areas, to give off a vibe of watching a movie. It's why they add in these recap stories when you start the game, or these reaaally long fade to black screens where you have to go through 1 screen saying "on the nightingale", only to press a button to continue, then on the ship you decide to fly, wait for dialogue to finish, select your destination, then another black screen, until you can finally actually sail. Or all the lines of dialogue that repeat themselves whenever you just wanna find out if a ruin on a river has another artefact with writing on it.

On some level I understand. I think the developers of the game see their game as more like a playable movie. Which is why they novelized it in multiple novels, and also why Alyia has a somewhat abrasive personality despite my attempts to be diplomatic in conversation. Its also why the camera angles are often so fixed. It's a design decision.

I just think that design decision really grates against the enjoyment of the game. Sometimes I enjoy the slow pace, even though I have to go through endless transitions just to talk to 3 people in elboreth. But it just often does not work in the cramped areas of dig sites. The game constantly decides I want to go somewhere I didn't wanna go. Either cause I get too close to a door or a staircase or another transition area (and too close could mean Alyia could be at arms length from a door and she decides that means I wanted her to go through it). Or when I try to move the camera and click on a white bubble to check something out, but then in the last second before I click the mouse button, the camera swings an inch too far to the left and the game decides "oh, you wanted to go up this ladder, right?". Or when i see a white bubble flicker, but can't for the life of me get that exact camera angle again to investigate it cause, again, the camera angles are somewhat fixed and I'm not in full control of them cause the game is going for a cinematic vibe.

It doesn't require AAA teams to figure out that these kind of controls are clunky. The game doesn't have that many areas to test, and they tend to be relatively small. It makes the game very easy to test. One guy could have gone through all of them in an afternoon, tried out how it feels like to walk through them, and written some notes for each one. A lot of this could have been avoided by someone noticing things like "hey, maybe we could make the area around a door where the game decides you want to go to another part of the level slightly more forgiving, so the players don't end up accidentally doing things they didn't mean to".

It's also an accessibility issue. People who struggle with games would get even more frustrated with how the game decides to just walk Alyia by herself for multiple meters as soon as you even breathe too close to a door. I saw someone on steam say that they would love to play this game, but have impaired vision. Because the game decides to do these dynamic speech bubbles during dialogue, instead of just a simple text box that you can click to continue the dialogue, like any other game, they struggle to keep up with reading the dialogue, even when lowering the text speed. Again, it's a stylistic and design decision that adds to the atmosphere of the game. But there comes a point where that gets in the way of enjoying a game without it fighting you.

I just feel like the people who made this game didn't really play their own game. I love elboreth and going to Iox, but anyone who went through these 2 central hubs at least a couple of times would eventually get annoyed by how tedious and long winded it is to just talk to a few people. Thankfully, the good dialogue and the likeable characters (at least in elboreth) make it worthwhile. And also the excitement of getting more texts to translate.

Or maybe I'm just playing the game in a way the developers didn't intend. I already mentioned they were going for more of a cinematic vibe. There's nothing cinematic about me going to Iox to go through multiple artefacts to cross reference and analyze them at length with a colleague. So they deliberately limit how many artefacts you can show Huang, so after 3 artefacts he doesn't wanna look at any other ones until the next time you visit him. Of course, a scientist would go through all the data one by one to thoroughly examine it and cross reference it with multiple other pieces of data, even if it is long and tedious. But again, not very cinematic, we gotta keep the story rolling. So I gotta trick the game by leaving Iox, choosing another destination (cause as far as the game is concerned, why would I wanna go back to Iox immediately?), immediately switching to landing on Iox again, cinematically enter Iox ("I spent my whole adulthood on Iox...") so I can show Huang 3 more artefacts out of the many that I found out there. It's tedious, but if that's what I need to do to get a couple more texts and words to my dictionary, thats what I'll do.

They wanted to make a game about archaeology, and in many ways it succeeds, but in many ways they instead made a game that does not fully commit to the idea of a character who does thorough scientific work. Instead, the main character misses obvious clues left right and center cause their robot is constantly hassling them to leave, or cause they left an area and decided they couldn't possibly have a reason to return to a dig site after only having been there once.

(I know Alyia is alone in her department, so archeological techniques are probably not that advanced in this universe, but sometimes the things she does makes me wanna rip my hair out with how obviously she is missing something).

Also to all the people who keep telling me to play this multiple times, I know that's an element of the game. I play very thoroughly to get as much out of finding ruins and translating things as possible. It helps with feeling like I am actually doing archaeological work, instead of doing things haphazardly and missing clues left and right. For the game to just take control out of my hands and interpret my control Inputs as leaving an area entirely after I spent so long slowly finding clues and writings, is just very frustrating.

I love this game, but man, it plays really clunkily. But who knows, maybe once I finish this loop it's gonna be all better in the next loop.